“If it was a line and it was white it probably was. Speed’s the only other thing people snort and that’s kind of yellow.”
“Thing is, Kevin drank for years. He was a wild man in the drink, famously wild. He drank everywhere, from first light to home time. And then he stopped a few years ago. If he was taking drugs everyone would know. He wouldn’t hide it. He’d be mad with it.”
Aoife nodded. “Right? But there was a line out on the table?”
“Yeah,” Paddy conceded, “and he’d vomited chalky powder in his saliva. I know it looks as if he’d-”
“Wait.” Aoife had a hand up. “He’d vomited white powder and there was a line for snorting on the table?”
Paddy hesitated. “Aye, I know it looks as if he was using but an ambulance took him away and he wasn’t admitted to any of the casualty departments-”
Aoife stopped her dead. “Who knows we’ve met?”
Paddy shrugged. “Anyone could know. The officers would have gossiped about Saturday night. Believe me about Kevin, it looks obvious but he-”
Aoife interrupted her again. “It doesn’t look obvious. It looks odd.” She stood up, suddenly, inexplicably angry. “Odd. Come you now with me.”
She grabbed a brown leather handbag off the floor by the strap, swinging it over her head and shouting out of the door into the corridor. “I’m going out for lunch. Don’t yous be tickling them in there.”
Paddy followed her out into the corridor and saw a man’s head looking back at her from the walk-in fridge. He shot her a smile and a thumbs-up.
“Follow me,” said Aoife, marching off down the corridor.
II
He stood in Lansdowne Crescent, hands tucked tightly into the pockets on his tracksuit trousers, taking in the general feel of the place. It was right next to a busy road but the houses were wrapped around a private garden, which seemed to absorb the noise. The old buildings faced each other with a quiet dignity. He had been up west loads of times, to Clatty Pat’s nightclub, choking with fanny on a Monday, but you wouldn’t really notice this place, not unless you were looking, not unless you’d got someone’s address from the phone book and come here deliberately.
The fat bird was two up, top flat. No security on the close door.
A big arch ran under the building, for carriages in the olden days, leading to a deserted backyard of overgrown gardens with tumbledown walls separating it from the lane. It would be dark at night.
III
The north bank of the Clyde was a godforsaken place. Paddy had gravitated here during smoky moments of self-pity and despondency. It was flyblown, paved over with cracked and stained concrete, and there was a sheer drop to the gray swirl of the water. There weren’t even very many seats.
Thin bushes separated it from the busy road, empty gold cans of superlager strewn at their feet. The sun though, the warm days and softness of the air, attracted a smattering of office workers there for their lunch.
They sat on the edge of a concrete box of bushes and Aoife offered her half her sandwich, a large baguette stuffed with enough egg mayonnaise to fill a skip. Someone in the office ran out with the lunchtime orders, she explained; it was all they’d had left with egg in it.
“Why would they even sell food this big?” She looked at it, puzzled. “It would do a coach party.”
“Yeah.” Paddy had eaten one of them herself once, and then had some biscuits. “So why did you say the thing with Kevin looked odd?”
Aoife took a bite and munched it into one corner of her mouth. “You see, a line is for snorting, inhaling. Vomiting cocaine means you’ve swallowed it. No one does both.”
“Do people swallow it?”
“Sometimes. Wrap it in a Rizla and swallow, just as effective but takes longer and it’s harder to pace yourself. But doing both is playing Russian roulette. It’s a hard enough balance to achieve through one method of ingestion.”
Paddy chewed a mouthful of creamy egg filling, enjoying Aoife’s accent, the hard nasal r’s and short vowels. “How could he disappear? Does that mean he wasn’t admitted to hospital at all? His hand was all curled up at the side.” She mimicked Kevin’s claw hand. “Could he have recovered before they got to hospital and gone to his parents or something?”
Aoife looked shifty. “Don’t think so. He may not have made it to hospital. He may have… you know… passed on.” When Aoife spoke again her voice was low. “They don’t trust me.”
Paddy looked at her. “Who?”
“Them. Upstairs. Graham Wilson was in with the bricks, one of the boys, they could trust him. That’ll be why your friend has disappeared: they knew I’d find traces in his nostrils and stomach and blurt it.”
“Who, though?”
The hard sun glinted on the water as two businessmen walked past, giggling and swinging their briefcases.
“Will we whistle after them lads there?” said Aoife, her mood lifting suddenly when she changed the subject.
“Yeah, go on,” Paddy dared her.
Aoife turned back to them and shouted under her breath, “Hey, you fellas: wheet whoow!”
They laughed to themselves, watching the businessmen retreat down the river.
“God, it’s been a hell of a morning,” said Paddy, and told Aoife about Collins coming to her house and the man watching her son’s school.
“This guy’s Northern Irish, ye say?”
“I’ve got a photo of him.” She opened her bag and took out the photocopies. “You might know him.”
“Aye, he’s probably my cousin or something, ’cause you know, Ireland ’s only twelve foot across.” Aoife looked at the enlargement of Collins and smiled. “You’re having a laugh.”
Paddy was bewildered. “Am I?”
They looked at each other, both searching for a clue.
“You know him,” prompted Aoife.
“Do I?”
“Don’t ye?”
Paddy shook her head.
“He’s famous, like you.” She could see Paddy didn’t know what she was talking about. “Martin McBree. He’s a major highheadjan in the IRA. Don’t you work in the papers?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know who this guy is.”
“Martin McBree?” she said again, as if that would clear it up. “The photo holding the guy on Bloody Sunday?”
“Never heard of him, sorry.”
“He was over in New York last year, ambassadorial duties, restructuring the Noraid funding people. It was on the nine o’clock news at home. He shook them up pretty badly. Brought in a whole new management team and got rid of the old guard. Those old fellas’d send them nothing but guns and psychos. The Republicans are shifting their position, moving towards a negotiated settlement. What they want now is to put a raft of peace seekers into positions of power.”
“So McBree’s a good guy?”
Aoife nodded that she thought so. Paddy thought back to Sunday night and McBree in her hallway. She could have had it all wrong, really. It was just a gut reaction to the guy: he was there with an agenda, she gathered that much, but it didn’t mean he was violent.
She was pleased to have been so wrong.
They had both done as much damage to the baguette as they could so they abandoned it on the wall and Paddy got out her cigarettes. Aoife took one from her.
“He’s made a wild lot of enemies.”
“McBree? Surely everyone wants peace?”
“Ye’d think, wouldn’t ye? That’s the trouble with armed struggle. Even if it starts out very noble with good men putting their higher feelings aside it’s always going to be a magnet for thugs and sadists. There’s always going to be a faction who don’t want it to end, you know?” Aoife stretched out her papery white legs, catching the sun. “Pathology is the sharp end. We see it all.” She squinted at her cigarette. “My old boss at home, he dealt with the Shankill Butchers’ victims. You ever hear of them?”